Urban Forms As Art is a an aesthetic journey through the American landscape that focuses on the component details of our urban community. Volume I- The Visual Survey of the Fire Escape shows us our own physical humanity by visiting the forms of our cities. It's Images of fire escapes from twelve American cities and different regions. Specifically it's a survey of a component that is really an architectural after thought. Our civil and industrial leaders placed more value on their own profit in the creation of industrial spaces, than the lives of the many workers inside their capitalist machine, leaving legislators to come to the rescue with an external solution. This iconic form is glorified with scenes in movies, but their everyday existence is to hang there as lonely as the wealthy industrialist's that initially omitted them. They speak of being our savior in an impending doom, and do so in shadows of light and mirrored reflections seen in complex overlapping Cartesian coordinates. This book shows us the beauty of a dying and uniquely American form. The images show the fire escape as eerily frozen time like they are from a cold war East Berlin, waiting for their removal by a follow on urban renewal that may never come. And yet very few architectural forms exhibit this much soliloquy of repetition and rhythm that is so involved with the hieratic form of a life safety function. They are ironic and speak of our human condition.
